this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Why was china hit with a famine again?
Literally due natural disasters because China was not developed enough to face them. China had famines every other year throughout all history before the communists won but of course the narrative is that communism is when famine.
And the great famine was exacerbated by the campaign to eliminate the "four pests", but the experts at the time were divided on the issue, and the party corrected course as soon as they saw other pests such as locusts increase and on the advice of other experts. They weren't just handing down nonsense orders willy nilly, they were desperately experimenting on the fly to make sure that famine stopped being an issue, and it did relatively soon.
Lysenkoism, Anti-intellectualism and other terrible terrible policies. But hey, Mao ate veggies uwu
Lysenkoism had been the official scientific stance on evolution in China from 1946 to 1956. Sounds like he had fuck all to do with China, sure.
Several of the techniques employed on collectivized farms, such as sextupling the density of seeds or deep plowing, were solely based on Lysenkoist teaching and had a fatal impact on yields.
Why was India?
Because Brits exploited the resources. For eg in Bengal famine Brits were exporting rice, whereas Indian people were starving and other reasons were high tax imposition and debt trap on farmers. The forced Indigo farming in 1/4 of the farm made the soil less cultivable for the next time. Many reasons.
Forced collectivisation of an entirely agrarian economy.
Industrial policy that encouraged small scale iron smelting in homemade furnaces causing huge environmental damage.
Agricultural policy that ordered the extermination of sparrows who then couldn't keep insect populations down causing catastrophic damage to crops.
Brutally cracked down on any dissenting voices, including scientists who happened to point out the potential flaws in Maos plan
Contrary to OPs post, covering up the mistakes afterward and blaming outside influences and counter-revolutionaries rather than the failure of central policy.
According to a Wikipedia article, "After the launch of Reform and opening up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Right Deviation Struggle, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split."
The official statement is here, but I don't read Chinese.
Ah. Google Translate comes through. I think the relevant part is where they say (machine translated): "Mainly due to the mistakes of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Anti-Rightist Movement", coupled with natural disasters at the time and the Soviet government's treacherous breach of the contract, my country's national economy encountered serious difficulties from 1959 to 1961, and the country and the people suffered heavy losses."
No one knows and probably never will. It was not a great leap forward for China that's for sure